Death and the surrounding culture’s obituary

Death and its surrounding culture, formerly called Death and the culture of death, passed away December 7, 2007, after three months of providing information to the Guerilla News class of New York University and the larger community. The blog is survived by two videos.

Death and its surrounding culture enjoyed when people commented on its blogposts; its best day perhaps was when its first death penalty posting was posted and several people articulately critiqued the process. Nothing made Death and its surrounding culture happier.

In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to Accidental impacts (http://www.accidental-impacts.org/index.html).

Final Morticians that Care magazine article

After much debate about what this story is about, this is my final article, an article about three courageous men who work in dangerous neighborhoods, trying to make them safer.

Embalming

This is what my experience with embalming was like:

 Billy’s shirt is open in the back and his pants have been torn in two.

His shirt and his pants had to be cut in order to get him dressed this Thursday morning, one last time, as he laid in his oak casket.

Tyrone Muhammad, a New Jersey licensed mortician with the Peace and Glory funeral home in Newark, has been working on Billy for the past few days when he is not working at PSE &G, the New Jersey utility company. He has spent countless hours between the autopsy that was performed on Travis to repairing the bullet wound in his right cheek to embalming his body. He meticulously combed every inch of Travis’ five foot, four inch, 16-year-old body looking over and over to find any death-caused flaws that a family wouldn’t want to see.

Muhammad sympathizes with any family of a deceased loved one. He was in their shoes years ago when his mother died. At the time, he was 24. While he was planning his mother’s funeral, the female funeral director approached him very gruffly and treated him poorly Muhammad thought with the assumption that as a young man he could not afford the $5,000 funeral.

Ever since then, Muhammad hung up his scrubs as a student studying to be a nurse and became a funeral director to provide better service to other families.

Before beginning the embalming, Muhammad checks for any signs of life, checking Billy’s pulse and cloudy corneas. Muhammad joked that the day that a body actually sits up while he is trying to embalm them is the day that he would quit, although he sees being a mortician as his life calling which therefore means that he will be embalming for the rest of his life.

After noting that Billy is deceased, Billy is stripped down and a “modesty cloth” is placed over his genitals. This clothing is placed in large plastic bags and his personal effects are inventoried.

Billy gets a massage, as Muhammad slowly works Billy’s arms and legs to relieve rigor mortis. Then Muhammad poses Billy’s dark brown eyes with an eye cap and his mouth is closed with a needle.

The real embalming process begins with the arterial embalming which involves injecting chemicals into the blood vessels. Incisions are made in the neck, armpit and near the groin to get the embalming solution, made of formaldehyde, methanol and ethanol, to raise an artery and drain any remaining fluids through the veins. Billy gets one last massage to ensure that the embalming fluids are evenly distributed.

“ The average time for a non post body, meaning there have not been no autopsy on it, can take about 45 minutes to one hour,“ Muhammad said. “An autopsy body about one to two hours. It varies and depend on the condition of the body.”

But Muhammad can spend a whole night working on one body; just when he thinks that he is done, Muhammad turns around, takes one more look at the body and finds some slight imperfection that needs to be remedied.

Muhammad began working on Billy on Monday, when the autopsy was performed. Billy was involved in a drive by shooting outside of Newark, where a bullet was lodged in his cheek.

“Oh my goodness you couldn’t image the satisfaction and rewards that come along with being a funeral director,“ Muhammad explained. “You’re in placed in the very unique setting. The families that I meet on a daily basis are unsure, confused, and detached from reality when they lose someone they love. I think being in position to provide them with the assurance that everything will be ok. Giving and showing the Love, to a point, comforting, caring and consoling them and putting a smile that leads to them on the road of recovery and being professional and giving them just for the last moment a good remembrance of their love one in the casket is the reward in itself outside of the monetary rewards.”

Before he starts making the final preparations, Muhammad likes to ask the family of the deceased to tell him a few things about the person. He takes those pieces of information to heart and remembers a lot of those details, making that death more personal than it would be otherwise.

While embalming, Muhammad thinks with a mixture of objectification (thinking that the corpse is a body), and compassion, leaning more toward compassion.

“I like to remove myself from that thinking, it can prohibit me from doing a good job on their loved one,” he said. “But don’t get me wrong I do feel for the lost of life, innocence, purity of the person but I think of them when I talked to them based on what the family tells me about them during the arrangements now most people that I tell that to say, ‘Muhammad you weird.’”

Those paragraphs I loved so much

This is how I was planning on starting my magazine article. Since I feel really connected to these paragraphs, as they just flowed when I wrote them, I wanted to post them so that hopefully someone can appreciate them. Enjoy.

Travis McGovern, 19, was laying outstretched on a cold metal table, his shirt open in the back.

Travis waited quietly, as quietly as his formerly jubilant body could be, his brown eyes closed. He was waiting for Tyrone Muhammad to put on his suit.

Travis’ long sleeve white collared shirt probably was the nicest shirt he ever owned. Muhammad fiddles with the collar, adjusting it slightly ever few seconds, deciding whether at a 35 degree angle is minimizes the small remnants of the bullet in Travis’ cheek.

The small, clinical looking room that Travis and Muhammad occupied in the basement of the Peace and Glory Funeral Home in Newark, New Jersey, has white regulation tile, picked out because it is easy to clean when blood splatters on it, a regular occurrence in the funeral home. The room has a scent of body odor delicately dotted with formaldehyde looming in the air.

Travis had already had an autopsy done after he was shot four times earlier that week, so he has already been embalmed. But Tyrone Muhammad still needed to clean Travis up and make him as presentable as possible for Travis’ family. Muhammad took a breath, calculating the task before him, and got to work.

The first thing, the most major post-mortem blemish that Muhammad had to correct, were the sucres lining Travis’ head, which engineered a receding hairline. Muhammad took a tuft of hair from the back of Travis’ head and, using Vaseline, adhered it to Travis’ hair. Next, the cheek. Travis was shot four times; three of the bullets were lodged in his abdomen but one grazed his cheek. The abdomen, Muhammad knew, would be covered by the clothing, but the cheek would pose a problem. Muhammad delicately pulled the bullet, and some of its fragments, out of the created cavity in Travis’ cheek. There was a microscopic piece of bullet left, which Muhammad agonized over for 15 minutes, changing his position attempting to find a better place to remove the egregious fragment. After he’d shifted positions six times, Muhammad gave Travis the last once over, decided that he was pleased with his work and left the funeral parlor just a few hours before Travis’ viewing.

Before Muhammad starts making the final preparations, he likes to ask the family of the deceased to tell him a few things about the person. He takes those pieces of information to heart and remembers a lot of those details, making that death more personal than it would be otherwise.

Before beginning the embalming process, Muhammad, a convert to Islam, a religion that does not believe in any bodily mutilation (even after death), has to take a breath and block out his thoughts when he begins embalming a body.

But Muhammad gets over that initial hesitation against embalming because that is what the family wants and that is why Muhammad became a funeral director – to serve families. That is why Muhammad traded in his scrubs as a student studying to be a nurse for the scrubs of a funeral director, a smock, coveralls and paper-like shoe covers.

“The average time for a non post body, meaning there have not been no autopsy on it, can take about 45 minutes to one hour,“ Muhammad said. “An autopsy body about one to two hours. It varies and depends on the condition of the body.”

But Muhammad can spend a whole night working on one body; just when he thinks that he is done, Muhammad turns around, takes one more look at the body and finds some slight imperfection that needs to be remedied.

Muhammad meticulously combed every inch of Travis’ five foot, four inch, 19-year-old body looking over and over to find any death-caused flaws that his family wouldn’t want to see; everywhere from the middle of his torso to his forehead.

Death penalty may be abolished in New Jersey

The death penalty may be abolished soon in New Jersey.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22133264/

According to this article, legislators in New Jersey feel that it is not deterring crime and that the death penalty is more expensive than life in prison. This will be the first time that a state has made that kind of decision since the middle 1970s.

I wonder whether this will become a trend. What do you think?

Mortician podcast

A conversation with a mortician

This is part of a conversation with funeral director John Pantoja. He discussed, among other things, his job, his perceptions of our death culture and how his job has changed since 9/11.

Hanging Harry

Warning: This website made me nauseous, so if you get a little bit squeemish you may not want to click this. But the following website is of several off-colored toys related to death:

http://www.perpetualkid.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=2350

For the first time in a little while, I’m speechless. Hanging Harry? Hanging Harry. That’s what our world has come to, a toy meant as a joke about someone who committed suicide?

The fact that we can joke about suicide like this I think says a lot about our death culture.

I’ve been analyzing our death culture for the past few months and honestly I’m a little bit surprised by this Hanging Harry character. Like funeral director John Pantoja said in the podcast, I think we largely live in a death denying country, where we try to avoid death at all costs and prolong lives through medical treatments and death is not casually discussed in conversation. But then that concept of death denying is counteracted with the proliferation of zombie and death-related movies out there, which maybe shows that Americans deal with death to a certain extent but its primarily in an imaginative, non-realistic way. But now, Hanging Harry, a plastic little man with a light cord around his neck, crosses both realms of the realistic and the imaginative, I think.

Americans need to talk about death more and we need to bridge the non-realistic with the realistic, but I don’t know that Hanging Harry was the right first step that we needed to take.

 What do you think?

Maple Grove slideshow

C:\Users\Owner\Desktop\Maple_Grove_4\publish_to_web\small.html

Myspace suicide

CNN just posted this about a Myspace suicide:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/12/03/internet.suicide/index.html

It’s awful to think that this message may have contributed to this girl’s suicide. And a possible cyberspace caused suicide is something that I never would have thought could happen. It’s such a shame to think that technology can add to the suicide rate, although ultimately it seems like it was the message, rather than how the message was transmitted, that might have caused this suicide.

 A video from Megan’s parents was posted on www.msnbc.com if you search for MySpace suicide. It was really interesting to hear from this family, as unfortunately we hear with many of these families who experience tragedies, that there is nothing that anyone can do to understand how these people feel. Life is precious.

Counting the dead

I saw a piece on the Weather Channel this weekend about heat wave related deaths. What was interesting about it, besides the fact that some people die with fans in their apartments that aren’t being used, is that different cities count their dead differently.

In Philadelphia, the dead from that heat wave were numbered in the range of 150-200 people in a matter of a week. In that same time, New York had similar temperatures and only reported four people dead.

This got me thinking: Does New York really have that much more resources than Philadelphia to keep people cool during a heat wave?

The answer: Perhaps, but largely it comes down to New York coroners and medical examiners just having a different way of tabulating these deaths. The Philadelphia count included anyone who died of a heat stroke, a heart attack related to the heat, or any other heat related illness. New York apparently took the temperature of the bodies at the time that they were found and used that to determine who died as a result of the heat wave.

This is problematic because if a coronor did not get to a body in a timely fashion, perhaps that body temperature began to drop. And largely this is problematic because funding wise cities who don’t accurately cite the severity of the problems within that city won’t be helped as much as they could be.

Deaths in different cultures

I had never really thought about the various ways that different people bury their beloved; it had just never occured to me that maybe one culture preferred cremation, one doesn’t want to be embalmed, etc. But because of my work this semester, I’ve learned a decent amount about different death cultures.

A few times a week I would send mortician Tyrone Muhammad a message to see if he had any body that he was working on so that I oulld watch an embalming. At least once a week, the answer was “Yes, but he’s a Muslim.” At first, I didn’t understand what that meant, but apparently Muslims do not get embalmed. They are strictly against any type of mutilation of the body, even after death, and even Mr. Muhammad, himself a Muslim, hopes not to be embalmed.

Muslims then also do not have wakes and are oftentimes buried within 24 hours of their death.

For more on the way that Muslims are buried, see : http://www.isna.net/services/casc/guide.html

Christians, conversely, are usually embalmed and there is almost always a wake held for the person for a few days. As a Catholic, I’ve noticed that we pay a lot of attention to the readings at the ceremony, which are picked out usually by a family member, and also provide a way for the family to be involved in the funeral and pay their respects. There are also committees at several Christian churches for families who are grieving, where people from the community help others get over their grief.

For more on Christian funerals, see: http://www.lectionarystudies.com/funerals.html

And conversely to the Christians, Jewish funerals seem to a bit more brief because their beliefs are guided more by simplicity. There is a kadish where people get together, eat and talk about the deceased and there are often prayers offered up for the person who died and a specific period of mourning.

For more on Jewish funerals, see: http://www.uscj.org/Guide_to_Jewish_Fune6211.html

Islamic and American death culture

While researching an article about deaths in different cultures and religions, I stumbled upon the following article:

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/stalinsky200405240846.asp

 I found the idea of loving death and martyrdom to be disturbing and I hope not true. Perhaps I just cannot understand a way of thinking where people want to die for a cause because I haven’t found a cause to die for yet. But in all seriousness, I cannot fathom loving something so much that you want to die for it.

But perhaps that comes from the general death-fearing culture that I think that we live in. While violence in certain cities is up and suicides unfortunately occur entirely too much, for the most part Americans prolong death as much as possible. Whether it’s perusing articles on how to live longer through a better diet or medically prolonging our lives, we seem like we are so afraid to die.

How do these two completely different cultures exist in the same world? I guess that’s the question that we’re dealing with now.

For One More Day

 

I just saw a commercial for the movie based on Mitch Albom’s book, For One More Day, and it got me thinking… The premise of the movie is what a person would do if they could have one more day with someone they lost.

So what would you do if you had one more day with someone you lost? Please leave your messages.

Sociological perspective

I’ve interviewed two “sociologists of death” about their viewpoints on our current culture and how it handles death as well as the historical changes in that perception. Here were some of our discussion points:

Dr. Michael Kearl, who used to teach a Sociology of Death class at Trinity University in Georgia, said that, “There has been a shift from embalming bodies to embalming memories.”  He explained that because of the new technologies being offered for memorializing people, like graves that offer a video screen with a pre-filmed message from the now deceased, the importance is being placed more on being remembered than preserving a body. Kearl mentioned something called a memory medallion and biblio cadavers which seemed really interesting.

But, on the other hand, Kearl also said that, “We have declared a war against death.” Kearl said that with the rise in the medical arts, the actual process of death has been hijacked and rather than dying in a bed surrounded by family in your home, it’s now usually in a hospital, sometimes alone. We have moved from a death that had some sort of religious meaning to one that should be technologically avoided. He used a really interesting term, the pornographic death, meaning that it’s death without any real association of grief, talking about our desensitization to violence, etc.

He went on to add that, “The goal is to kill anything that kills us, whether they are microbes or terrorists,” saying that we fear death so much that we use that to ensure our own safety and survival.

I also spoke to Professor Gary Laderman, who teaches at Emory University, and he added that we now have an obsession with death in our pop culture, with the emergence of a million zombie movies, etc., but that because of that there are no opportunities to discuss the reality of death. He said that our current culture really doesn’t want to deal with that reality and somehow we think that by having things like movies with ghosts in them that we are lightly touching on it when in fact we aren’t.

To add to what Kearl said about death become more clinical, Laderman wrote in his book, Resting in Peace: Cultural history and death of the funeral home in the 21st century, that “Dying in the isolated space of the hospital room institutionalized the experience as a passage requiring scientific and increasingly technological intervention, rather than prayers and the presence of the community.” (Laderman, 4)

And further: “Life must be sustained at all costs, with death viewed as a devastating defeat. In the words of historican Philippe Aries, ‘Death… ceased to be accepted as a natural, necessary phenomenon. Death is a failure, a ‘business lost.’” (Laderman, 3).

Accidental killers

For any David Halberstam fans, I just saw this on MSNBC’s website.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21901311/

I can’t even imagine being that graduate student now, knowing that I contributed toward the death of such a great journalist.

It got me thinking about people involved in these sorts of situations, where accidentally someone dies and what that must do to them.

 I found an account of one woman (Maryann Gray) in particular who struggled after she accidentally killed an 8-year-old boy while driving. It sounds like this was purely an accident, that she just had no time to stop for a boy who darted into the street, and it got me thinking that this sort of situation must really have an effect on people. I mean, one minute you’re driving down the road like millions of other Americans and the next minute you’re a killer.

 Maryann Gray’s story is featured here: http://jscms.jrn.columbia.edu/cns/2007-04-10/swains-accidentalkillers

There was something striking in here that I wanted to bring to light; one of the people randomly quoted in a 1981 study said something to the effect of this man feeling that he is unlawfully punished for the unlawful action that the victim made. I wouldn’t want to take a side in this situation, as it is just all-around horrible, but I can’t imagine someone’s life changing instantaneously like this, particularly when it seems almost irreversible.

Luckily there are groups like the one mentioned in this article who help accidental killers get through the trauma.

http://www.accidental-impacts.org/index.html

Death penalty hits

I’m really pleased by all of the responses that I’ve gotten thus far from my last post about the Florida man who’s execution was stayed. For a new blogger like myself, seeing an inbox that keeps replenishing itself with comments is astounding. Thank you all for your posts.

Realizing how popular of a topic this is, I thought that perhaps that the death penalty discussion should be opened a little more.

While I’m one of those old-school journalists who feels that they shouldn’t share their opinions, I’m going to step out of my comfort zone and start sharing.

I’ve been against the death penalty for as long as I can remember. I’ve gone to Catholic schools, up until now, for an equally long time and I think at first my rationale for being against the death penalty had to do with the compassion that was instilled in me by this education; that even though someone is a killer, they are still a child of God. My thinking has changed a little bit on this. Now, my answer as far as questions about the death penalty are concerned is, “Who am I to tellsomeone that they should die?” I’m an almost 23-year-old, in-the-grand-scheme -of-the-world meaningless journalist, why should I have the right to decide whether someone lives or dies?

I’m sure by now someone who is a bit more pro-death penalty may want to strangle me, and I could understand that. I can sympathize with a family who had a loved one murdered in a horrific way. And I would never condone what a killer does to their victim and I hope that I’m not coming across that way.

Perhaps having something like that happen to me would completely change my way of thinking. And I would obviously never want someone who gruesomely murdered someone to be out on the streets (I think they should get life in prison without the possibility of parole), but again I don’t know that the whole “eye for an eye” mentality is really helpful.

I went to college in Philadelphia, a city where someone is murdered every day now. I don’t think that knowing that the death penalty is a possibility is really working as a deterrent. I think that if that were the case there would be a lot few killings. So if we’re not hindering people from killing each other, then what is the point of the death penalty? Revenge? Again, maybe if I were in someone’s shoes who had lost a loved one in such a way I would want revenge myself. But until that happens, and I pray that it doesn’t, I may never know. Maybe my opinion will change as I keep growing up and I may find myself on the other side of the argument when I have children and can fully understand wanting to protect another human being like that.

So what do you think? Is there a major flaw in my logic? Am I just plain crazy? Feel free to say anything that you find appropriate and pertinent to the topic; I really am interested in other people’s view points.

Recent death penalty stay

I just read about a convicted child killer who’s execution was stayed shortly before he was supposed to die. This stay was not because people are debating his innocence but rather because of the means of death itself.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/law/11/15/florida.execution.ap/index.html

When I read the very last sentence, I didn’t know what to think. That someone could go through that kind of anguish, whether they are a murderer or not, seems so inhumane. What do you think?

The psyche of a killer?

Mr. Peterson, the man who’s 23-year-old wife is missing, has been debated in the news lately as an example of a cold killer. While I can’t speculate either way as to whether he had anything to do with his wife’s disappearance, there was an interesting article on MSNBC about Peterson’s body language and why that is leading people to be believe that he had something to do with this scenario.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21813759/

 When we determine whether or not he had any involvement I hope to update this post.

Veteran’s Day

Here’s a Veteran’s Day tribute from CNN.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/11/12/veterans.irpt/index.html

Family members’ involvement

It seems like these days at least once a week there is a report of someone missing/killed and one of their loved ones is involved in it. It’s so hard to believe that someone close to you could do something like this, like what happened to this nine-year-old girl, but that seems to be the trend. I hope to get actual statistics on that.  But for now, here’s the article about the nine-year-old.

 http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/11/10/missing.girl.ap/index.html

Infant mortality

There is nothing sadder than the loss of a child, particularly one under the age of one. They never got to experience everything that the world has to offer, from disappointment to delight, and in many cases it could have been prevented.

There’s an article on MSNBC, the link is below, about infant mortality and how in certain zip codes it is higher than in third world countries. Yeah, just take that in for a second. I couldn’t believe it.

What’s also troubling is that so many of these deaths could have been prevented, particularly those from children who are put to sleep on their stomachs.

It’s a heartwrenching article but I think it’s important to read and hopefully it will promote some kind of activism.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21655131/

In the end, what matters?

In Professor Michael Kearl’s textbook, entitled Endings, his final chapter includes several sections about the process of dying.  One part of that chapter is as follows:

“The awareness of one’s finitude can lead to a sense of ecstasy at being freed from social constraints, an experience explored by existential  philosophers. Many devote their lives to conforming to the expectations of others so as to receive their attention, and true individualism may only come at life’s end. To assist in death’s potential to produce such self-discoveries, psychiatrist David Spiegal of Stanford conducts group therapy sessions for terminally ill cancer patients. To gain a sense of resolution and not waste final days with death preoccupations, he had individuals first prepare lists of their central properties and attributes. They then meditate on giving up each of these aspects of their identities, one by one, quality by quality. Finally, they are perhaps able to local the essential part of themselves that remains.” (pages 490-491).

I found this to be a really interesting exercise for anyone and something that people should think about prior to their death. To be cliche, since no one knows when they’re going to meet their maker and people can get preoccupied with things that do not matter and making themselves “cool”, perhaps we could all learn something from this meditation.

 Let me know if it helps you at all.

Looking forward to dying?

I came across something in a textbook for a sociology of death class that I found really striking. It was in a section of the book about the professional approach to death, where counselors help people with the idea of death.  This is one of those posts though where it’s probably more helpful to read the article and listen to my comments afterward, because it is just so unbelieveable.

Living longer

I don’t know if any of you buy into these kinds of tips, as it seems like one day someone says not to eat chocolate and the next day tells the public that they’re rich in antioxidants. But for anyone who is interested in some tips to stay healthier longer, here’s what I found.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21654898/

Constitutionality of death

I saw an article, originally posted on MSNBC’s website and then there was a similar version on Fox’s website, about the constitutionality of a lethal injection.

Prior to reading this, it had never occured to me to question whether this was constitutional or not. Moral, definitely. Constitutional, not so much.